by Lily Thomas
Rokki wasn’t going to scare his human mate with a jarring bite… not on their first time together. He should do it on the next full moon, which wasn’t too far away. He could be patient. He had her in his arms, which was all he needed. By then, the seer who lived in the caves would have cast a spell over them, allowing them to speak so he could explain his desire to claim her under the moon with his bite.
Pulling out of her, Rokki wrapped his arms around her and laid them both down on the ground. He placed her between his hot body and the warmth of the fire so she wouldn’t grow chilled as the night only grew colder.
“Aye whant du toh knohw aye awm stweel pissd at du.” His mate mumbled to him as sleep washed over her.
Rokki stroked a hand through her hair as he massaged her scalp, loving the closeness with her. Someday, he would know what she was saying, and he couldn’t wait.
Chapter 10
Rokki wanted nothing more than to speak with her… his mate. There was no doubt in his mind that they were built for each other. The gods were smiling down on him, and he wanted nothing more than to join with her under the full moon before tying their lives together in their village cave.
The evening had passed uneventfully, except for their passionate time in each other’s arms. A memory he would never be able to forget. Ever. His Andrea was so passionate and responsive. He wished he could lay her down on the ground and dive in between her legs again.
Sadly, they had no time.
Rokki was determined to get to the seer before another night enveloped them in darkness. He’d much rather stay the night in a cave than under the trees. There were a lot of predators out there, and he didn’t need a hungry animal challenging him to a fight so it could make an easy meal of his mate.
He had a mate to protect, and she made him vulnerable.
If two or more predators attacked, like a pack of wolves, there was no possible way for him to keep her safe from all those teeth and claws. He would end up dying trying to save her, and then she would be left to die on her own.
Rokki growled to himself as he and his dire wolf protested the thought of her dying.
He had to get them to the seer.
The terrain grew rougher the further they walked. Large grey boulders dotted the area, replacing the dark green pine trees. Despite looking like she wanted to quit, Andrea kept trudging on. It looked like her feet hurt her again, as she seemed to shift her weight on them. Rokki made a mental note of it. He would have to give her some more of the yellow flowers for her feet, or maybe the seer would have something stronger.
If he wasn’t so anxious to speak with his mate, he wouldn’t push them so hard, but there were things he needed to know about her, like if she was a witch or a human.
If she were a witch, it would mean he was the prophesized son who would take control of the pack as alpha, and if she were human, he would be the one to be kicked out of the clan once his brother found his mate.
Rokki wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted her to be, or if he even wanted to lead the clan. His dire wolf wanted to be pack leader, it was ingrained in his alpha beast, but his human head knew a lot went into keeping his pack safe. It would be a lot of weight on his shoulders, a weight he wasn’t sure he wanted or could lift.
Rokki’s eyes slid over to where Andrea walked beside him. She caught him staring and sent him a wide smile.
“Hewwo.” Andrea sent him a wave with one of her hands.
His brows drew down as they continued to walk up the hill. He wasn’t completely sure why she was greeting him… they hadn’t separated long enough for a greeting. He shrugged it off. His mate had some strange habits, but maybe among her clan, it was normal to randomly wave at someone who had never left.
By mid-day, Rokki spotted the caves up ahead of them. Just a couple of seconds, and they would be standing at the entrance of the cave. His heart sped up in his chest, like a herd of mammoths charging. Soon, he would understand his mate!
Caw!
Rokki tilted his head back until he spotted a black dot circling above them.
A black raven cawed above them. The large wings were stretched wide, and the bird circled above them, cawing their arrival.
The seer, who was also a witch, had raised this raven since it was a chick, and rumor in the clan gatherings was that it was another pair of eyes for her. No one could sneak up on her without that bird announcing their arrival, which meant she would be ready for them.
“We are here.” Rokki took the lead as he led them up a small rocky trail to the entrance of the cave.
“Who comes to my cave?” A female voice called from the cave. It wasn’t a booming voice. It was light and musical.
As Rokki and Andrea walked up to the dark entrance of the cave, he finally saw the witch’s face. It’d been tattooed with red ink. Lines and dots crisscrossed over her young face, and long black hair curled around her shoulders like poisonous snakes that were ready to strike. She held a gnarled wood staff in one hand, and her breasts were bare to the world. She was a beauty, Rokki would give her that, but no one was more beautiful than his mate.
Andrea sucked in a scandalized breath.
Rokki glanced over to her with raised brows and saw that his mate stared openly at the seer’s breasts.
Like he’d thought, her clan must believe in covering up more than the clans in this area. It wasn’t uncommon to see men and women exposing their bodies to the world.
“We seek your help,” Rokki said as he turned his attention back to the seer.
The seer’s upper lip pulled back. “A wolf.” Her hand went white on her staff as her green eyes glared daggers at him.
Rokki’s hackles rose. Would she curse him and throw him out for being a werewolf? “I am.”
“You’ve brought me your mate?” The seer eyed Andrea with less hostility. “Ah, I can see your dilemma, wolf. Your mate is unable to speak with you.” She said when Andrea just glanced between them with a blank stare.
“She can speak, but I don’t understand her.” Rokki corrected the seer’s words.
“It is the same.” The seer waved a hand dismissively and strode back into her cave.
“Will you help us?” Rokki took a step forward as a bit of panic set in. It looked like the seer wasn’t going to help them. If the seer didn’t help, he would have to teach his mate how to speak his language, and he’d hate to know how long that would take her.
“I will help you.” The seer called out as she walked further into her cave.
Rokki wasn’t sure whether or not to follow the seer since she wasn’t saying anything, but he chose to place a hand on the small of Andrea’s back, and guided her into the cave beside him.
Darkness surrounded them as they walked over the rough entrance of the cave. The seer’s cave hadn’t been lived in long enough to form a smooth floor, and Rokki did his best to guide Andrea, who couldn’t see as well in the dark. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before they broke into a small chamber with a fire burning in the center. A hole in the ceiling of the cave allowed the smoke to vent without suffocating the occupants.
“Take a seat.” The seer laid her staff on the floor and took a seat on some folded animal skins next to the fire.
Rokki sat and patted the spot on the stone floor next to him to indicate Andrea should also be seated. She complied, her eyes still stuck on the seer in front of them as she crisscrossed her legs. His eyes narrowed as he found his mate’s gaze stuck on the seer’s breasts. When Andrea set foot in his village, her eyes would surely pop out of her head when she saw all the half-naked women walking around.
The seer pulled some grass baskets, and some animal skin sacks to her, before grabbing a bowl made of wood. Taking different items out of each bag, she used a stick to make a paste, and then poured some water into the bowl to make a liquid, and then presented it to Andrea with two hands.
Andrea finally glanced away from the seer to him.
Rokki nodded his head and raised his hands to his mouth and
tilted his head back, mimicking drinking from the bowl. He couldn’t tell her it was safe with words, but he could still tell her that this was something she should do, and he hoped she trusted him enough to do it.
Andrea turned back to the bowl, held out her hands, and took the small wooden bowl from the seer. She raised it to her nose, which automatically crinkled, and she held the bowl away from her face. “Du espect meh to drwink dis?”
He mimicked drinking the bowl again.
“Oh, gawd.” Andrea grimaced, but she raised the lip of the bowl to her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, and chugged the contents of the bowl. “Gah!” Her tongue leaped out of her mouth, and she shook it a little as she grimaced.
Once she recovered, Andrea handed the bowl back to the seer. “That was horrible.”
Shock widened Rokki’s eyes before a pleased smile crossed his lips. “I can understand you.”
Andrea’s head of auburn locks nearly spun off her neck as she twisted to set her green eyes on him. “I can… understand you, but how?” She glanced between him and the seer like they’d both suddenly sprouted wings.
“I asked the seer to use her magic to allow us to speak,” Rokki explained with awe in his voice. It had worked! The potion had worked on Andrea!
“Magic?” Andrea asked as she continued to glance between them.
“Yes, magic,” Rokki confirmed.
“You fucking asshole.”
Rokki’s head shot back like she’d slapped him. Those had not been the words he’d expected out of her mouth.
“How dare you!” Andrea grabbed the bowl, which sat on the ground near her and threw the object at him.
Rokki ducked, and the bowl soared over his head before clattering against the rock wall behind him. “Andrea?” He asked as he righted himself.
“You broke my bracelet.” She pulled the bracelet out, which he hadn’t known she still had on her, and she shoved it into his face. “You took my freedom from me!”
Andrea couldn’t help her white-hot anger. She’d been waiting to vent to him and thought she would never get the chance. Last night when she’d closed her eyes, she’d expected to wake back up in her hotel room, but she hadn’t. And now she firmly believed the bracelet was magic and brought her back to the ice age.
Rokki had literally crushed her chance at going home!
“I’m stuck here because of you.” She hissed.
Rokki appeared speechless at her venomous tone. His golden eyes grew stormy as he suddenly flung himself to his feet, nearly conking his head on the stone ceiling of the cave. “I need to go back to my village before my pack wonders where I’ve gone. She needs something for her feet.” He motioned to Andrea while addressing the seer.
Then he stormed away before she could utter a single word. His black hair swung around his face as he turned on a heel and strode towards the entrance of the cave.
“Where’s he going?” Andrea asked the seer as her eyes drifted over to the woman. “Is he leaving me here?” Panic set into her chest.
“Let the wolf go,” the woman waved a hand dismissively, “No one needs a wolf around. Troublesome and easy to anger those beasts.” The woman began to put her supplies away.
Andrea’s heart thundered in her chest as she debated running after Rokki, but she willed herself to calm. Closing her eyes, she asked, “He called you a seer?”
“Witch. Seer. I dabble in both.”
“Is this a dream?” Now that Andrea could speak with people, they were going to have a hard time shutting her up. There were so many questions swirling around her head.
“Dream?” The seer laughed as her green eyes danced with amusement. “This is no dream.” The seer cocked her head to the side, and her green eyes grew hazy as she stared at Andrea.
“Hello?” Andrea waved a hand in the air.
A few seconds later, and after thoroughly creeping out Andrea, the seer righted her head.
“You are from the future, and your world is strange to me, but you are meant to be here. You belong here. This is your destiny.”
“Uh, yeah.” What was a twenty-first century woman supposed to say to that? “Well, as much as I would love to stay, I was hoping you might be able to fix this for me?” She held out the bracelet that Rokki had snapped in half.
“Hmmm.” The seer studied it before plucking the two halves out of Andrea’s hand. “Very beautiful. Does it have meaning to you?”
“Yes. A lot.” Andrea said, truthfully. “It can bring me back to my world.”
“You don’t need it.” The seer said as her green eyes studied Andrea.
“I need it fixed,” Andrea assured the woman. “I need to get home. People, my people, will wonder where I am.”
The seer shrugged with a sigh. “I can build you another, but you will need to wait. This takes time.”
“Of course.” Andrea wasn’t going to place any time constraints on the woman when the seer was willing to fix her bracelet.
Andrea looked towards the entrance of the cave, wondering if and when Rokki would make his reappearance.
“He won’t be back for a while.”
“How do you know that?” Andrea faced the woman again. When the woman sent her a quirked eyebrow, Andrea held up a hand, “Yeah, I should have known. You’re a seer. You can see the future.”
As the seer put her pouches and baskets away in the cave, Andrea cleared her throat. “What should I call you?”
“My name is Elvira and yours?”
“Andrea.”
A caw echoed down the cave entrance as a large black blob flew across Andrea’s line of sight.
“Ack!” Andrea scrambled back until her back bumped into the pokey cave wall. When she found the source of the movement with her eyes, she found the raven from outside was now inside the cave, sitting on a root that protruded from a cave wall. “Is,” she pointed at the raven, “that your pet?”
Elvira glanced over at her black feathered companion. “I don’t know what pet is, but he is my companion. I found him on the forest floor a long time ago when he was a chick and raised him as my own. Perhaps you could call him my child.”
The raven cawed like he understood the seer. Then again, if Elvira was a witch as well as a seer, she could have cast a spell on the raven so she could understand the animal.
“So, he’s kind of like your familiar.”
“You speak strange words,” Elvira said with a chuckle. “My potion allows us to speak, but there are still words that I don’t understand.”
Andrea skipped the assumption. It didn’t matter what the raven was to Elvira. “Are you sure this isn’t a dream?”
“I am,” Elvira said with a firm nod of her head. “Rokki, Jepriz, and I are all real.”
Putting two and two together, Andrea figured Jepriz must be Elvira’s raven. The beady black eyes of the raven followed her every moment. Jepriz would turn his head to fix Andrea with an eye. He was an intelligent little bird.
“So, how long until the bracelet is fixed? I wouldn’t mind going home.” Soon. But she didn’t say the word out loud. She figured it was implied.
“Be patient. Magic takes time, and magic that’s rushed always goes bad. You wouldn’t want to keep going further back in time, would you?” Elvira’s green eyes studied her as she waited for a response.
“I guess not,” Andrea admitted. Although seeing even more of the past would hold interest, she’d hate to get stuck there. “I have another question.”
“I will do my best to answer your question.” Elvira held out her arm, and her raven flew to her. When he landed, he floofed his wings, poofing out before his glossy black feathers fell flat on his body.
“Is this my real body, or is my body still in my time… rotting away.” It was a real worry. She didn’t want her twenty-first century self rotting in her hotel bed. That would disturb the hotel’s housekeeper.
A smile cracked across Elvira’s lips. “Your bed is empty. You are you. There is no need to worry about another body.”
Well, that was good, at least. She’d hate for someone at the hotel to wander across her body and think she was in a coma or worse, dead, when really she wasn’t… or bury her because they thought was dead.
Andrea cringed at the thought of waking up in a coffin in the ground. Nightmares of all nightmares. To be surrounded by dark in a tiny space under six feet of heavy, suffocating dirt. Shudders rolled through her at the image her mind had created.
“I can see you’re worried about being here,” the seer interrupted Andrea’s thoughts, “but your wolf will take care of you.”
Elvira’s words calmed Andrea a bit, but still, “I don’t know him.”
“Don’t you?” Elvira raised a dark eyebrow with a knowing smile.
A blush sprang across Andrea’s face in a flood of heat, and it had nothing to do with the warmth pumping off the fire in front of her. She was speaking with a seer. This woman may have seen her night in Rokki’s arms long before it had happened. “Sleeping with him doesn’t mean I know him.”
Elvira shrugged her exposed shoulders, jostling her naked breasts with the sudden movement. “Although a wolf wouldn’t be my first choice in a man, I can see why he would attract you.” Her green eyes twinkled in the firelight.
“Wait,” Andrea held up a hand, “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. I slept with him, I didn’t proclaim my love.” She wouldn’t mind some more nights with him, even if she were pissed about his actions. He was an attractive man and so far very gentle with her. And someday, she would get her apology out of him for breaking her way home.
“He is a werewolf, Andrea,” Elvira said as though she should know what that meant.
“So?” Andrea scrunched up her face in confusion.
“Wolves mate for life.” Elvira offered a tid bit to her raven, Jepriz. The bird’s long black beak snatched up the offered food, and he quickly guzzled it.
Andrea blinked as the information settled in, and her brain had time to process the words. “Are you saying… he thinks we are mates?!”